Will We Complain or Lead?

Have you had your fill of empty promises from our elected officials? Are you sick and tired of hearing that same excuses from your spouse? Do you have any confidence at all in the agreements your boss has made with you? Sadly, most of us will answer “NO!” to one or more of these questions.

So what do we do about it? If we put up and shut up we’re playing the victim game. That makes us look pathetic, but at least we have the satisfaction of garnering at least some sympathy, probably from people even less positive than we. Personally, I hate that option. Let’s nix it now!

We could be snarky or engage in passive aggressive behavior. That’s always nice, because we get to use our lack of self-esteem and pseudo-superiority to make other people look like idiots to everyone else, while at the same time causing them pain. Not the outcome that will heal the planet, so let’s not do that either.

It’s far too easy to wimp out as a victim or use cynicism to live life. Senator Cory Booker recently wrote that cynicism is the refuge of cowards. That’s a blunt statement with tremendous impact, one that holds a message for us.

No matter who hard we’ve tried to accomplish anything in the past, or how often our efforts have been thwarted, we only have two choices: Give up and retreat to our refuge of choice (think sex, shopping, substance abuse, depression, etc); or, Get up, dust ourselves off and again go at the issues for which we know we must advocate.

There hasn’t been a time of more cynicism in the world in the past fifty years or even more than there is today. We have the choice to buy into this trend or take the actions we know we must to have a life worth living. What will you do this week to move forward in life?

There’s already a lot of things going on in the world that can affect us, but only we have the choice to change our attitude. Let’s agree to move forward, be willing to address our own issues and call to task anyone around us who is not living in integrity. To do that, we must start with ourselves.